Being Catholic these days …

… Summer Reading Series: Frank Freeman on Richard Rodriguez - Today's American Catholic. (Hat tip, Day Lull.)

Despite his revulsion at the new liturgy and his own doubts, Rodriguez continues to believe. He echoes the words of Saint Peter: “Lord, where else would we go?” “If I should lose my faith in God, I would have no place to go to where I could feel myself a man. . . . Though [the church] leaves me unsatisfied, I fear giving it up, falling through space.” “Even in today’s Catholic Church,” he adds, “it is possible for me to feel myself in the eye of God, while I kneel in the presence of others.” Secular institutions cannot provide what “the temple and the mosque and church” can, he says. Then he warns, presciently, that secular institutions “deny their limits” and “pretend there is no difference between public and private life. The worst are totalitarian governments.” He winds up this third essay with the heartfelt lament: “If God is dead I will cry into the void.”